September 30, 2010

At its 65th General Assembly session last week,
the United Nations played host to a speech by the president of the
Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But, while the UN gave a
platform to a Holocaust-denying leader of a nation that sentences
adulterous women to death by stoning while hanging “convicted”
homosexuals, one voice was strangely absent: that of Taiwan’s.

Taiwan, a democratic nation of 23 million, has rule of law, religious
freedom, and the 20th largest economy in the world (ironically, just
behind Iran)—but, it doesn’t have membership in the UN.

Interestingly, at the time of the UN’s creation, Taiwan was occupied
by Imperial Japan, which had annexed the island in 1895 after the First
Sino-Japanese War. Prior to the 50-year period of Japanese colonization,
China had a weak and periodic hold on Taiwan, culminating in a formal
renunciation of Chinese sovereignty in 1871.

As an area under the control of Japan at the close of World War II,
the people of Taiwan would have ideally held a plebiscite to determine
their political future, but the Allies handed Taiwan over to the
Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek. When the Nationalists lost
their war in mainland China to the Communists in 1949, Chiang’s forces
retreated to Taiwan with some 2 million refugees.

By 1971, the UN General Assembly, its ranks swollen
with decolonized African nations friendly to the Communist regime in
Beijing, voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the sole
legitimate government of China. The Taiwanese government ceased claiming
to represent mainland China in 1991 after which it began an effort to
seek UN membership—only to be constantly rebuffed by China’s veto.
The UN’s history has been full of such injustices. The UN was founded
on June 26, 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany but before the
defeat of Imperial Japan, the original five permanent members of its 15
member Security Council consisted of WWII’s “Big Five” Allied powers:
Nationalist China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the
United States. Seen as a replacement to the failed League of Nations in
1943, the UN started with lofty pretensions, adopting President Franklin
Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” as part of its initial charter: freedom of
speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
That the UN would make an immediate mockery of its charter by
admitting Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was bad enough. Further insult
was added to diplomatic injury when the “nations” of Belarus and Ukraine
were given UN membership as well, this, despite that fact that they
were not independent nations in any sense of the word in 1945 as they
were constituent parts of the former USSR.

Conversely, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) wasn’t
granted UN membership until 1973, even though it had been a functioning
democracy with rule of law for 24 years and a member of the democratic
West’s NATO alliance since 1955.

Today’s UN consists of 192 member states. As in 1945 with the former
Soviet Union, many of them make mockery of FDR’s “Four Freedoms.” The
UN’s membership includes military dictatorships (Myanmar), absolute
monarchies (Brunei), Islamic religious states (Iran), failed states
(Somalia), and one-party Communist dynasties (North Korea). Its
47-member Human Rights Council includes China, Cuba, Libya, and Saudi
Arabia, hardly beacons of democracy, fair elections, and religious
freedom.

Not only are large nations represented in the UN, but tiny ones are
as well, many of them relics of feudal history, such as Andorra (pop.
84,000), Liechtenstein (pop. 35,000), Monaco (33,000) and San Marino
(30,000). Even the tiny Pacific country of Tuvalu, population 12,373, is
a UN member state.

The UN assesses the United States $598 million per year, almost a
quarter of the world agency’s budget. This payment buys America
membership in a club where less than half of the members grant their
citizens full suffrage. Is it any wonder that the UN is so consistently
hostile to American principles when 104 of its 192 member governments
thumb their noses at representative democracy?

The UN has outlived its usefulness. The majority of member nations
mock the UN’s founding charter when they prevent their own citizens from
enjoying liberty. Rather than spending taxpayer money to prop up an
international body that increasingly appears to loathe democracy, the
U.S. should consider forming an alternative international organization
where full membership would be contingent on free elections, rule of
law, and respect for the rights of the minority. Of course, Taiwan would
be invited to be a founding member.
Who knows, perhaps someday Taiwan can vote to welcome a democratic
China to full membership in the League of Free Nations.